Post navigation

Every now and then I find a mistake in Wikipedia. Often, I note the mistake on one of my blogs or, more often, on my facebook page. Usually, somebody fixes it. But also, usually somebody tells me that I should just go and fix it because I can easily do that because Wikipedia is the people’s encyclopedia and everybody can fix it.

I don’t do that, and here’s why. There are actually three reasons. The first and least important reason is that making a change in Wikipedia is part of a community process in which the change I make may be unmade by someone else, or challenged. There’s nothing wrong with that … that process is how Wikipedia manages to get to a point where the articles (depending on the article) are reasonably accurate and useful. The problem is, I can’t tell in advance what that process is going to entail. I may make a change and it gets revised to be better. That’s good. But I also might make a change and find myself in the middle of a pre-existing fight (or a fight that emerges simply because I made the change) that I wasn’t planning on getting involved in, and once I’ve gotten involved in it … especially in the case where my change caused the fight … I’d have the responsibility to continue engagement. There would be a risk that a change I’d make would lead ultimately to a change I would be very much against if I don’t maintain my involvement. I don’t want to do that because I’m already engaged in more fights than I want to be engaged in.

Second, as a writer I like to write my own tuff. Other people can certainly critique or comment on the things I write (especially if it is on a blog where they can comment) but it is still my writing. I am perfectly happy with collaborative writing, and I’ve done plenty of that, but I don’t consider any involvement I’d have in Wikipedia collaborative unless I more fully engaged in it and became part of some sub-community maintaining certain pages. Again, I chose to not expend my energy in that particular area.

Third, although it seems to be easy to get involved in Wikipedia page writing, editing, and maintenance, I don’t think it is all that easy. The people who do it make it look easy, and I very much appreciate their efforts. But for me to assume that I can engage in this activity without learning to become effective, and backing up my inputs with a longer term commitment, is hubris. I’d be very happy to help any Wikipedia contributor working in an area where I have some expertise or knowledge by providing information I have at my fingertips. But, I think engagement in Wikipedia is a responsibility that involves some skill and knowledge and a longer term commitment which I’m not interested in doing at this time.

There is a fourth and less specific and less well articulated reason that I should mention. I think Wikipedia is great, but it also has the potential for messing up the information that is available on a certain topic. Since it is collaborative and often does not include the perspective of experienced experts on a topic, it can become too homogeneous and even in its treatment of sources. Here’s an example. If you try to find out in Wikipedia what the proper divisions of the geography of Africa are (what countries should be included in terms like “West Africa”, “Central Africa”, “East Africa” etc.) you’ll find, I think, something that you’ll never or only rarely see in an actual course, or module in a course, on the divisions of the continent, or in a standard textbook. This is, I think, because there are multiple government agencies or NGO’s, such as the US CIA, various units of the UN, and so on, that have taken the more traditional ways of dividing the continent and revised them significantly for their own purposes. These particularistic paradigms of division address institute-specific issues like which languages are spoken, where an agency has resources, or other large scale economic, political, or cultural issues that are useful for those specific organizations but that conflict with other requirements. The best overall geographical divisions are probably those that include a large number of factors and have a strong link to historical background, and also, that are relatively stable. In other words, there really is probably only ONE way to divide up a continent like Africa, and this way will have problems for every single division (should Rwananda be part of Central or East Africa?) but by having one single method, terms like East Africa, North Africa, etc. will have general utility. Last time I checked Wikipedia on this there was no single best method proposed, and none of the methods discussed were the classic method that I learned in school and that the vast majority of my colleagues in Anthropology and Geography actually use.

Thank you to all the people who actively engage in making Wikipedia so useful. But I’ll need to continue to use my current method: Suggesting changes or pointing out problems now and then, and hoping others with the skills and experience that I don’t have consider addressing those issues.

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “Why I Don’t Edit Wikipedia”

In regards to the first reason, I often edit mistakes I see, but I make a rule of never engaging in a debate if people disagree. If I’m asked to justify a change, I will, but if somebody thinks I’m wrong, I don’t think it’s worth the effort to debate the issue.

I share your first and second concern and I would like to add a fourth that I believe makes involvement with Wikipedia something I would have an issue with on a more ideological perspective. With a project like Wikipedia I think the purpose (and I’d argue even a duty) to try to get the correct information exists. If you hold yourself out to be a reliable source then you should do everything possible to attempt to be a reliable source. The principles that guide Wikipedia seem designed to make being reliable difficult and as such when Wikipedia is accurate it is only because there is no real disagreement on a topic.

If I am going to make this claim I should support it with something more than just my say so. As such I’d like to point at two principles of Wikipedia that I find objectionable. The first is the motto “verifiability not truth” that is the foundation of Wikipedia editing. As long as something is said somewhere even if it is not the truth the fact that it was stated is sufficient to have it accepted as reliable by Wikipedia. I understand what they were aiming for since on contentious issues truth is possibly a subjective issue but I still find the principle unacceptable. To consider making the commitment to edit Wikipedia I would need to see verifiability AND truth as the motto. Truth does not have to be capital-T truth but could be defined as verifiability by a certain number of truly independent sources the number of which would be a function of the reliability of the sources and the degree of contention over the claim needing support.
The second principle I have serious concerns about is the preference for secondary sources over primary sources.

Unlike the “verifiability not truth” I cannot even imagine why secondary sources would be consider superior to primary sources. By definition secondary sources will be at best as accurate as secondary sources and almost always less so. If a Wikipedia article is discussing efficacy of a specific drug to combat a disease rather than rely on the clinical studies directly Wikipedia editing guidelines would rather rely on a newspaper or magazine article that relied on those studies. There is absolutely no reason to do this. Primary sources are always the superior source and one should only rely on secondary sources when primary sources are too difficult to find.

I can’t look past these two design flaws and when I add to these that I find the quality of the secondary sources they allow as reliable to often be of questionable quality and I find participating in a site like Wikipedia would be a disservice to truth. Why waste my time with something that is founded on principles I see as flawed and that opens up the entire project to manipulation?

Comments are closed.

The Skeptical Search Engine

Use this search box to find information on science, heatlh, etc. from a select subset of sites that are not selling woo.

Climate Science Search Engie

Use this search box to find information on climate change and global warming from trusted and well informed sites.